Where Is the Love?: Oliver Twist |
by George Sax |
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At first blush, Roman Polanski may seem an unlikely choice to film Charles Dickens’ famous novel of harrowed childhood, Oliver Twist. A cinematic provocateur, a creator of ominous and deranged psychological environments, he is also prone to exhibit a bleak humor.
As it happens, it wasn’t much of a stretch at all. Polanski’s own childhood was a terrifying adventure in escaping from the European Holocaust (his mother died in Auschwitz). And Dickens’ novel has its darker motifs and ugliness. Its more melodramatic passages often have a gothic intensity.
Dickens’ purposes included more than storytelling; there was a sociological and moral aim. The novel is implicitly an argument against class-engendered cruelty, particularly to children. (That this is a problem that hasn’t gone away since Dickens’ era, look no further than to Barbara Bush among the hurricane refugees in Houston.)
Polanski’s version is a richly visualized, skillfully assembled and impressively performed one. The convincing 1830s London streetscapes are courtesy of present-day Prague, and the movie’s city is a teeming, filthy, metropolis of crude social disparities. It’s all rendered rather handsome in spite of this, which makes it occasionally something less than Dickensian. The author’s low-life London contained foul precincts and fouler deeds, desperate people and acts.
Polanski might have been expected to resist the temptation to indulge in conventional aestheticizing and to emphasize the novel’s terrors and heightened drama, but his approach is rather restrained. David Lean’s 1948 version is more starkly emotional, and its characters are more outsized. It also has Alec Guinness’ notorious slyly creepy portrayal of a Jewish Fagin, the fencer of stolen goods and gatherer of stray, predatory boys and girls who procure cash and items for his hoard.
Ben Kingsley’s Fagin is a little less grotesque, but also a little more frightening: he is the most psychologically persuasive presence in the movie.
Jamie Foreman as the self-justifying and brutish Bill Sikes, and Leanne Rowe as Nancy, his mistress (the story’s most tragically poignant character), are well matched and individually fine.
Eleven-year-old Barney Clark’s Oliver is sometimes in the shadows of other characters, but the youngster makes a credible, if slightly symbolic, victim/hero.
Polanski’s Oliver Twist may be a little too handsome, a little too measured and uninflected, but it’s certainly not an unworthy accomplishment. Barbara Bush may not get it, but that’s not the director’s fault.
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